Writer, photographer, explorer: Luis Mardens 64 years with National Geographic shaped the magazine.

Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

There didnt seem to be a corner of the universe that didnt interest him. He never just covered a story; he lived itrather; he inhabited itwrapping himself in the subject as if in a cashmere coat. He didnt just write about bamboo; he grew a stand of tonkin bamboo in his yard. In addition to buying the finest bamboo fly rods he could find, he built his own; at last count he had 50 split-cane rods.

His passion was embellished by theatrical flair. When he spoke French, you could almost see him twirling his mustache with Gallic flair. In Spain he assumed the beret, the stance, the gestures of a Spaniard. Once in Italy, Ed Jones, a fellow staffer, ran into him on a bridge. Jones didnt recognize him at first; Marden had returned to his Italian roots.

He was self-effacing about his accomplishments but not unaware of collegial jealousies. The tragedy of Marden was that he was not born a British lord, his colleague Kenneth MacLeish once said, with a whiff of envy.

He dressed and acted the part. His manners were impeccable, his bearing courtly. You would see him in the halls talking with a colleague, slightly stooped, a deferential bend of the head, as if bowing toward the person with whom he was conversing. He loved beautiful thingsthe perfect varnish of a Payne rod, the burled walnut of a Jaguar dashboard, the graceful lines of a Nakashima chair. He not only noticed details, he collected them, storing each fact in his retrieval bank until the opportune moment when the light clicked on. If chance favors the prepared mind, his was in a constant state of red alert.

The office was wall-to-wall books, stacks of dictionaries and grammars in different languagesTahitian, Fijian, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, Danish, Arabic, Tongan, Turkish, Maori; books on celestial navigation, sailboats, fish, birds, orchids; autographed photographs from the King of Tonga, Cousteau, Orville Wright; and, on a corner table, an old brass diving helmet from the Mediterranean. In later years his door bore two inscribed plaques: Lat 38° 54´ 17´´ N Lon 77° 02´ 18´´ W, representing the coordinates of his office. He was a man, you might say, who knew precisely where he stood.

In More to Explore the National Geographic Magazine team shares some of their best sources and other information. Special thanks to the Research Division.

Luis Marden arrived at National Geographic with his lightweight Leica hanging from a neck strap in 1934 and soon took a heavy load off Geographic photographers. At that time instantaneous exposure was unknown. Photographers were lugging around suitcases full of equipment: heavy glass plates for film and bulky Ica and Graflex cameras with shutter speeds so slow tripods were indispensable. In 1931 staff photographer W. Robert Moore took 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of equipment with him to China, 150 pounds (70 kilograms) of it glass plates alone. As Marden recalls, To take 12 pictures you had to have 24 pieces of 5-by-7-inch (13-by-18 centimeter) glass, half of them thick plate glass to withstand the jolting in the field. An early jibe was photographers, like gorillas, had long arms, with knuckles dragging the ground because of the weight they carried. But Mardens Leica, a so-called miniature camera, changed all that, and as a champion of 35-mm Kodachrome he brought a new dimension to the pages of National Geographic Magazine.

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Readers of Cathy Newmans ode to the Societys multifaceted Luis Marden might wonder about the spelling of the two species named after him. The orchid species Epistephium mardenii ends in double ii, but the sea flea Dolobrotus mardeni ends in a single i. The reason lies in the strict rules for botanical names. When the orchid was first discovered and its name published in Mardens 1971 orchid article as Epistephium mardeni, the international rules book was not as well-known. Now, with 300 to 500 new orchids to be named each year, orchid identifiers follow the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature to organize the confusion. Any new species named for a man and ending in a consonant other than r has a double ii ending. All species discovered by women close with iae.